Posts Tagged ‘Transparency’

We are excited to announce that we have a new name, The Common Data Project. We’ve changed our name for a couple of reasons, to avoid confusion around our use of the words “trust” and “foundation.” As an organization trying to create a new kind of nonprofit institution, we were interested in using these words to help explain our work through analogies to existing institutions–a datatrust that holds an individual’s personal information like a personal financial account, an organization that provides “grants” of information to researchers and nonprofit organizations. But given the specific legal definitions of a financial “trust” and “foundation,” we’ve decided that it’s more important to avoid public confusion. After all, we’re very decidedly not an investment company nor a private foundation.

In any case, we like the immediacy of the word “project”! We’re excited about moving forward on our Project and we hope you’ll get involved with our Project as well.

My contracts professor from law school, Ian Ayres, suggests in his book Super Crunchers that the IRS become a source for useful information for ordinary people. The agency could tell taxpayers how much others in their income bracket, on average, are donating to charity or contributing to their IRAs, or tell small businesses whether they might be spending too much money on advertising.

Of course, this would be inconceivable in the U.S.—there’s a law against it. But as Ian Ayres suggests, the idea that the government should be giving information back to us, instead of just collecting it from us, isn’t totally crazy and Scandinavian. It could be released in anonymized aggregates or in others ways that wouldn’t reveal how much our neighbor makes. The information could be genuinely useful, not just titillating.

There could even be implications for public policy. So much of government policy is expressed in the Internal Revenue Code (such as favoring homeownership over renting), but our debates about tax cuts, mortgage deductions, and credits are based on fairly imprecise numbers. Even as we argue about what a tax cut will do to the “middle class,” we don’t even know what the “middle class” is. Where should government transparency start, if not at the point of revenue collection?